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Resolve to Sell More in 2014

For 2014 you’re going to commit to selling more, reaching your goals, staying motivated, and living a better life. Here’s how you do it.

Keep a Sales Log

Very few technicians and salespeople (or their supervisors) can tell me:

• The number of calls they ran last year

• The total dollar volume for the year

• Their conversion rate

• The dollar amount of their average sale.

There are other things that could be measured, but I consider the above to be the bare minimum.

You want to improve your sales, and what gets measured gets improved.

At the very least, you should keep a running list of all your sales in a notebook or a digital device.

A better system is to use a weekly planner, and January is the perfect time of year to go out and get one. I still prefer to use the good old-fashioned paper variety, and I describe how to use one in the first video of the Tec Daddy DVD series, which you can watch for free on my website at http://www.hvacprofitboosters.com/tec-daddys-service-technician-survival-school-on-dvd.php.

Five months after I released that video, I received a telephone call from a man who was the service manager over 30 technicians. He called to tell me that, at his weekly staff meeting, he asked the group who was keeping a sales log in the manner I described in the video. Of his 30 techs, 15 raised their hands. This company posts everyone’s sales figures on a whiteboard in the training room. He instantly noticed a pattern. The 15 guys who raised their hands also happened to be the leaders on the board.

I got the idea to keep a sales log from the late Tom McCart. He said that keeping a sales log was one of the two things he attributed to his success. (The other reason was that he studied and practiced his salesmanship.)

Set Sales Goals

If sales go up, and you don’t have sales goals, they went up by accident. When you set sales goals and are actively pursuing them, you’re reaching them on purpose. How are you going to hit the bulls-eye when you don’t even have a target?

There are only two reasons not to set sales goals:

1. You don’t know how to do it

2. Stress caused by the fear of failure.

It all starts with knowing where to begin. Your sales log will help you set your goals. When you keep a sales log, within the first week of doing so, you’ll know your conversion rate, the dollar amount of your average sale, and your daily average. If you’ll keep your closing ratio up and make it a point not to make the total dollar amount of your recommendations less than the dollar amount of your average sale, your sales will start go up.

Setting sales goals means you’re going to try to improve yourself. It also means that you’re putting your reputation on the line in front of your biggest critic – yourself. That’s where the stress comes into play. Setting a goal to increase your sales (and your income) means you’ll have to do better than you’ve been doing.

In his new book, Life Code, Dr. Phil McGraw says, “Anxiety is one of the biggest obstacles to success in anyone’s life. If you so much as admit to yourself that you want more than you currently have, you can experience a tremendous amount of anxiety. Why? Because once you’ve admitted that what you have now is not what you want, how can you ever be satisfied staying where you are? Just admitting it to yourself puts pressure on you to try for something more. And in almost every situation, for you to have more, for you to have a greater degree of success, the world and, more specifically, the people in it, must accept and value what you have to offer. And when you put yourself out there, you’re risking something. If you’re like most people, your number one fear is rejection, and your number one need is acceptance.

Make a Commitment

The biggest problem people have with sales goals is making the internal commitment to hit them.

Once you’ve got a feel for your daily average, set a daily sales goal and commit to running calls until you hit it. If you’re like me, and hate working late, you’ll hit your daily minimum by early afternoon every day. If you’re not willing to make that commitment, then you don’t really have a goal. What you’re calling a goal is really just “a guideline,” or something that would “be nice” if it happened.

When you commit to hitting your sales goals, you’re committing to having a better life.

Stay Motivated

Goal setting is the answer to the age old question of, “How do you stay motivated?”

When you set sales goals, you’re also setting income goals. Decide what you’re going to do with that additional income. If it’s material possessions, get pictures of them and keep them in your sales log, and look at them every day. Fall asleep at night dreaming about them.

Set some goals and make certain you take one step toward achieving them every day and you’ll start having a good reason to get up and go to work in the morning, because you’ll be making progress. You’ll start getting somewhere every day.

You might think you’re working for someone else, but you’re not. One way or another, you’re working for yourself.

You’re getting a pay raise in 2014, and it becomes effective as soon as you do!

Charlie Greer is an HVAC sales trainer and is the only person to be voted the Tom McCart HVAC Consultant-of-the-Year twice. You can purchase his new “Gameday Planner” for 2014, which is specifically designed to help HVAC service technicians and salespeople keep track of their sales and set their sales goals, by going to www.hvacprofitboosters.com or calling 800-963-HVAC (4822). Email Charlie at [email protected].